Briffa on another Mann Hockey Stick

Like many other people, I’m gradually digesting the CRU letters. Obviously I’m going to comment on them but I’m going to start a little slowly. Here’s one that’s a little fun, where Briffa discusses an otherwise unreported Mann hockey stick, one as “significant” as the frequency of the name Gavin. See here. Briffa:

I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other “target” series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and … (better say no more)

Gavin Schmidt recently discussed the spurious regression arising from regression of temperature against incidence of the name “Gavin”, an example introduced by Lucia.

31 Comments

Clearly the current construct has failed humanity with respect to climate change.

With all the asterisks attached to various temperature records and reconstructions what’s the possibility of something akin to an open source project for archiving of data and development and debate of various processing schema?

This is obviously expandable beyond just temperature records, there are clear deficiencies in many parameters need for anything close to climate diagnostics.

What I would like to know is this. Is the data contained in the hacked release more complete than the data you’ve obtained via FOIA requests through the official channels? If so, I can’t wait to see the results of your analysis!

The Tom Harrison who is fanatically editing the Climategate (now renamed CRU Hacking incident) page seems to be an alarmist according to his commentary in the discussion page for that article, denying the validity of any of the emails and insisting that that is not how scientists behave. At the same time according to his user talk page, it appears he is banning any skeptic who is posting more information as a “sock puppet” of some other previously banned skeptic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tom_harrison

Oh, and while I’m at it. I’m wondering if this hacker is following the BigGovernment/ACRON model where releases are concerned. I note the message notifying about the first release said it was a “random sample”.

Perhaps whoever did this is waiting for The Team to make firm statements.

Those words were chosen carefully. Indeed, that’s exactly what that means. Whoever did this thought it out pretty carefully. The real question is, is the leaker holding anything back that’s even more damaging? Only time will tell.

Gad, what a novel. I’m usually not one to go in for drama, but I’m totally sucked into this.

On another note: The name McIntyre occurs 440 times in the collected email files, and that excludes alternate spellings such as ‘MM’, ‘McCarthy’ and ‘Mc-I’m not entirely-there-in-the-head’. I guess that makes him the most-cited sceptic in this important scientific resource. Would look good on a CV.

I don’t know whether you have all seen the paper analyzing the observed
data that Ben and I sent to J. Climate ?? This is where the JGR paper
began, and it is useful to compare both papers. In the J. Climate paper
we assessed the best fits using a subjective balance of raw and lowpass
filtered results. The reason for this was because of the difficulty of
setting up an automated procedure — which is the problem that Ben is
currently having to deal with. In the next iteration of the JGR paper,
the reason for moving to a more automated procedure will be explained.
Both the subjective and automated procedures have their advantages and
disadvantages. The latter procedure, of course, is in no way
‘objective’. Many subjective choices have to be made in setting up the
procedure. This is why the word ‘automated’ is used above, rather than
‘objective’.

If you have not seen the J. Climate paper, let me know and I will send
you a copy. There is a companion paper that has been accepted by GRL
that I will send at the same time.

Cheers, Tom.

——————————————————

Yeah, better to use “automated”… it looks more scientific… and you need all the help you can get once to toss objectivity out the window.

The reason this story is not getting wider play is that our side has not packaged it properly. The story should be about official corruption and obstruction of FOIA. Everything elase is clouding the storyline and making it look like it just a food fight over arcane technical issues.

I posted this over at Anthony’s, but figure it deserves to appear here too.

Well at last… The BBC have finally given some airtime to this story and even a quick 6 frame shot of WUWT. Not on BBCworld or BBC1 or BBCNews – But on BBC Look East the local news bulletin for East Anglia.

The report concentrated on the fact that police have been brought in to investigate the hacking. Also some views were b’cast from atendees of a Green March in East Anglia today and a convert to AGW who is an MP – sorry I missed his name.

Briffa does seem reasonable, but Trenbarth seems quite objective and fair and unlike the others, acknowledges the weaknesses in their data and theories, as well as admits to the validity of skeptics arguments. I’m also curious what Andy Revkin thinks now that he knows that Phil and the gang don’t see him as reliable.

I’d also like to add my kudu’s to Steve. He has been completely vindicated by all of these disclosures. The most amazing thing about it is he kept his cool, didn’t say anything incendiary and kept coming at them with problems that eventually were too big to fit under the rug.

All the dismissive snarks in the emails and at RC should be worn as badges of honor.

I did some research on the Briffa 2000 piece on the CA main site, and it appears that if nothing else, the number of samples claimed for the -200 -> 2000 reconstruction was overstated by more than 100%.

Apparently the 611 trees cited came from yamal.rwm, which was sent to Briffa from Rashit Hantemirov in Oct of 98. The file is in the yamal directory in the leaked files, the explanation is in an email from Rashit (Just search for yama.rwm in the leaked emails, it will be the only occurrence.)

But… The trees go back to 4999 B.C and only 257 of the 611 samples cited actually contained any post 200B.C. data.. Whoops!

Also here is a plot (with 21 year mean in red) of the actual (un-regressed, un-“corrected”) Yamal tree ring data for the last 2000 years.

(Please excuse the data format being jpeg.. I will be re-encoding as png and releasing the matlab source later today…)
Chris

Sorry for not replying sooner – its been a hectic week (or two)!
The new Mann and Jones 2000-year series I don’t actually have. It appears in Figure 1 of our EOS piece, of course, but Scott Rutherford generated that figure. I generated Figure 2 for EOS and that has the Yamal, Tornetrask, western US and western Greenland O18 stack in it. So I have these data and they are attached in the following files. western US and western Greenland are in file “mann12prox.dat”. I didn’t have time to extract just these two series from the full file, so the file contains 11 others series too. Please do *not* use the others because I’m not sure whether I am free to distribute them or not – I just haven’t time to extract the 2 you want. I’m sure I can trust you not to use anything that I shouldn’t have sent! The top of the file lists the 13 series and the start/end years. These are in the same order as the 13 columns of data that then follow (the first column is simply year AD). So you should be able to find westgrpfisher.dat” and “wustrees.dat”.